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Visits to Site and Serps?

Do google and bing factor in how many people visit your site per month to determine your serps rankings?

If so, does it matter if they visit your site by searching a keyword phrase or by typing in the name in the search bar?

My instinct tells me that if the search engine sees 1000 hits per month for a site by keyword phrase and that is high for the industry then they might rank that site higher in the serps.

I was wondering if the same would be true if the site is designed and coded properly for a keyword phrase but receives the same 1000 hits per month from visitors typing in the sites name in the search field rather than the search phrase, would that then translate to higher rankings for the keyword phrase?

2 Responses

Google and Bing search engines have NO definitive way of knowing what your site traffic is, Joel. In the same vein, they have no way of knowing what your site's bounce rate or time on site are. So none of these can specifically be used for ranking purposes. (As you asked in other questions)

The only way Google might do this is if they tapped into your Google Analytics data, but since not all sites use Google Analytics, or implement it the same way, this would be a VERY flawed ranking method. In addition, Google reps have repeatedly said they do not access any Analytics data for ranking. (I was in the room when Matt Cutts asserted it again at 2012's SMX Advanced) And of course, since Bing doesn't have an analytics product, there's no way for them to use traffic volume data either.

"My instinct tells me that if the search engine sees 1000 hits per month for a site by keyword phrase and that is high for the industry then they might rank that site higher in the serps."

You've sort of got it. What the search engines can track is click through rate (CTR) from their results pages. If a page of your site appears on a search results page (an impression) and 20% of the time it appears, it results in a click, it will get a bit of a rankings boost compared to another page that appears just as often but only gets clicked 2% of the time. As always though - this is just one of several hundred ranking signals. You can see this impressions/CTR data very clearly in your Google Webmaster Tools account)

A corollary to this, related to bounce rate. The one "bounce" search engines can know about is if a visitor finds your page in a search result and clicks on it, goes to your page, but then immediately clicks back out of your page and back to the search results page. The search engines likely consider this a signal that your page didn't satisfy the search query well and that will be a negative signal. This "bounce" is understandable to them because the searchers' actions both occurred immediately on the SE's results pages where they can do tracking. (i.e. the going and immediately coming back)

"...visitors typing in the sites name in the search field rather than the search phrase, would that then translate to higher rankings for the keyword phrase?"

Nope. The search engine would have to be clairvoyant to manage that! How could they possibly know what search term you had in your mind when all you actually typed (and therefore all that's available to them) is the website's name?

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